WHEN INDUSTRIAL BASE MATTERS MORE THAN FINANCE: America’s Monopoly Crisis Hits the Military.

VACLAV KLAUS: National Sovereignty and the Unsolvable Problem of the EU.

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THAT’S WHY THE LEFTIST PRESSURE GROUPS ARE GOING AFTER MASTERCARD AND PAYPAL, ETC. NOW: YouTube looks to demonetization as punishment for major creators, but it doesn’t work.

AND SHE WAS A NASTY PROSECUTOR, TOO:

Hey, remember when Kamala Harris argued that jailing a man with a faked confession wasn’t “outrageous?” “If Harris really thinks that knowingly producing a fraudulent document to secure an illicit advantage isn’t ‘outrageous,’ then perhaps she slept through her legal ethics courses.”

SUPPLY, MEET DEMAND: “It Feels Like I’m at a Rally”: For Pro-Trump Comedians, Business Is Booming.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: Taxi driver framed for rape now scared to carry females.

A taxi driver falsely accused of rape by a passenger has told a court that he is now afraid to pick up female fares, as the judge in the case warned a woman she faces jail over the allegations.

Laura Hood, 27, maintained for more than two-and-a-half years she had been attacked by taxi driver Haroon Yousaf, but last week finally admitted that the incident did not take place.

But she continued to deny the allegation against her and said she was innocent because she had not knowingly lied, and instead had a false belief of “something so clear in my head”.

#BelieveAllWomen.

OPEN THREAD: Talk about whatever interests you.

HEH: Democratic Candidates Call To Fix The Best U.S. Economy We’ve Had In A Decade.

WHY ARE PUBLIC SCHOOLS SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXUAL ABUSE? Substitute school nurse accused of making advances on teen boy.

IT’S ON: Drunkblogging the First Democratic Debate: Night Two.

Here’s the lineup if you’re just tuning in:

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont (Democratic Socialist)

Sen. Kamala Harris of California (People’s Democratic Socialist)

Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana (Socialist Democratic People’s Party)

Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado (Progressive Socialist-Democrat)

Author Marianne Williamson (Progressive Democrat-Socialist)

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York (Democratic Progressive-Socialist)

Rep. Eric Swalwell of California (Bolshevik)

Former Vice President Joe Biden (Menshevik)

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang (Filthy Running Dog Capitalist Pig, But Possibly LGBTQ-Friendly)

Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado. (Democrat, Not Socialist, He Swears)

I’ve been carbo-loading all day, so the odds of passing out at my desk are… pretty good, probably.

GETTING HARDER TO TELL THE PRC DICTATORS FROM GOOGLE: Unofficial HK protest anthem “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord” banned on Chinese streaming platform.

REVOLT AGAINST THE RULING CLASS, AUSTRALIAN EDITION: The public’s fury at being told what to do and think has exploded with the Folau fiasco.

Maybe Rugby Australia did have the right to sack Folau as a matter of contract law (or maybe not, but that’s for the courts to decide). The likes of Qantas and ANZ can direct sponsorship money wherever they like, and they wouldn’t be the first big corporates to engage in such asinine virtue-signalling. GoFundMe is a private platform, and may very well have been within its rights under its own terms of service to boot out Folau’s fundraising appeal, hypocritical and selective as that may have been.

But just because those organisations could have done what they did doesn’t mean that they should have. As a matter of public policy, the Folau affair is a dead end, but as a cultural issue, it is troubling. It’s another front in what the left derisively write off as the ‘culture wars’, in a world in which what can and can’t be said (by force of law or otherwise) is becoming increasingly limited.

And here is where Phelps is dead wrong: The media feeding frenzy created by the Folau case is not a ‘rally point’ seized upon by the right. If the left are frustrated by the amount of attention Folau is getting – and no doubt they probably are – then they only have themselves to blame.

As many have noted, if Rugby Australia had simply issued a statement distancing themselves from Folau’s views and moved on, then his original Instagram post would have been long forgotten by now. But by overreacting, the Rugby Australia – and the ‘inclusivity’ zealots egging them on – have turned one man’s particular religious beliefs into a full-blown national brouhaha.

They have to perform for their peer group, though. Let the backlash become serious enough to remind them that their peers’ opinions aren’t the only ones to matter.

HUGE WIN FOR TRUMP: Dems Agree to Emergency Funding for Border Crisis They Once Called ‘Fake.’

REMINDER: If you buy through Amazon display ads on the blog, we don’t get a dime. We only get paid if you purchase through the text links in InstaPundit posts.

STACY MCCAIN: Google’s LGBTQ+ Totalitarians.

CHANGE: Domestic abuse soars in Japan, and it’s men reporting women for the violence. “Reports of women getting violent or abusing men have skyrocketed in Japan in recent years, with experts suggesting economic decline and a ‘calm and gentle’ male culture shift may be driving the animosity. . . . But the real figure could be far higher, as most incidents are not reported to the authorities, according to Cabinet Office statistics. In 2017, 14.5 per cent of 5,000 Japanese men who replied to a study said they had been on the receiving end of domestic violence, up from 10.8 per cent in 2014 and 8.1 per cent in 2002.”

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HOUSE PASSES BIPARTISAN BORDER SUPPLEMENTAL SPENDING BILL.

FATAL FLAW IN ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PEACE PLAN?: Jeff Goodson is a developmental aid advocate with decades of experience in the field.

The Trump administration has just rolled out the economic part of its new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. It will facilitate some $50 billion in socioeconomic development, with over $27 billion going to Gaza and the West Bank. The balance will go to Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.

The plan is nation-building on steroids. It would fund everything from roads, power, water, ICT and border infrastructure, to governance, to health and education, to regional economic integration. It’s big, it’s bold and it’s comprehensive. There’s just one problem. As we’ve learned repeatedly since World War II, development doesn’t buy peace in ethnic and religious wars.

Well worth reading.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Inventing Victimhood — Universities too often serve as “hate-crime hoax” mills.

On November 9, 2016, Oberlin students Jonathan Aladin, Endia Lawrence, and Cecelia Whettstone fought with Allyn Gibson, the owner’s grandson, after he tried to apprehend Aladin for stealing alcohol. The students claimed that they had been racially profiled. Students, professors, and even some in the Oberlin administration launched a boycott of the bakery, including protests and pickets. The school cancelled its contracts with Gibson’s. But the allegations proved baseless: the students had in fact been caught stealing from the store, and they admitted as much when they pled guilty the following August.

Advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center make headlines by claiming that hate crimes have surged since Trump’s election, but the real surge is in hate-crime hoaxes, especially among university students. The day after the 2016 election, Eleesha Long, a student at Bowling Green State University—about 90 miles west of Oberlin—said that she was attacked by white Trump supporters, who threw rocks at her. Police concluded that she had fabricated the story. That same day, Kathy Mirah Tu, a University of Minnesota student, claimed in a viral social-media post that she was detained by police after fighting a racist man who had attacked her. Campus and local police said that they had had no contact with her. And again that day, a Muslim student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette made up a story about being attacked and robbed by Trump supporters, who supposedly ripped off her hijab. For weeks after Trump’s election, America was fed a series of outrageous stories of campus race hatred that fell apart upon examination.

As Rick Moran wrote in February, the Chicago PD were initially terrified of vigorously questioning actor Jussie Smollett’s claims of MAGA-wearing, noose-toting attackers. Even at this late date, “Google Protecting Jussie Smollett From ‘Disparaging’ Searches,” according to the Washington Free Beacon in mid-June. Because conservatives have seen these sorts of stories over and over and over again for years on college campuses, (where the will to power has long derived from victimhood, to coin a phrase), they were much quicker to raise red flags over his stunt right from the start. Or as Roger Kimball wrote on Smollett, also back in February, “The less hate there is in the United States, the more hate crimes must be manufactured in order to keep the Fraternal Order of Victims afloat.”

NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: AOC: Obama Ran Concentration Camps.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: 12 Trends Killing College.

HE’S NOT WRONG: Trump: Google, Twitter, Facebook ‘trying to rig the election.’